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While social interaction is claimed to help reduce racial bias, the evidence is mixed. We argue that not only interaction, but familiarity among agents may help reduce race bias. We use new data from MasterChef, a nationally syndicated television competition that cover 10 years. We find that familiarity does not help reduce race bias. When judges are all Caucasian they appear to favor Caucasian contestants and set back minority contestants in the final placements. Interestingly, we find an analogous finding with minority judges. Female judges are the only ones who show no bias.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission is providing the scientific community with millions of light curves of stars spread across the whole sky. Since 2018 the telescope has detected thousands of planet candidates that need to be meticulously scrutinized before being considered amenable targets for follow-up programs. We present the second catalog of the Plant Patrol citizen science project containing 999 uniformly-vetted exoplanet candidates within the TESS ExoFOP archive. The catalog was produced by fully exploiting the power of the Citizen Science Planet Patrol project. We vetted TESS Objects of Interest (TOIs) based on the results of Discovery And Vetting of Exoplanets DAVE pipeline. We also implemented the Automatic Disposition Generator, a custom procedure aimed at generating the final classification for each TOI that was vetted by at least three vetters. The majority of the candidates in our catalog, $752$ TOIs, passed the vetting process and were labelled as planet candidates. We ruled out $142$ candidates as false positives and flagged $105$ as potential false positives. Our final dispositions and comments for all the planet candidates are provided as a publicly available supplementary table., Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures, 5 tables. Accepted for publication on MNRAS

© Cranfield University 2021. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the written permission of the copyright owner. Small celestial bodies such as asteroids and comets are abundantly present in the Solar System, yet their surfaces remain largely unexplored. Achieving regular access to these surfaces would have a major impact on capabilities such as planetary defence and in situ resource utilisation and lead to significant scientific insights. However, missions close to small celestial objects remain challenging in at least two aspects: technically, due to weak gravity fields, complex operational environments and latency from long communication times, and commercially, with the applications still being few and cost-ineffective. A potential solution to reducing development and operational costs and obtaining robust, scalable operations, could be using small, camera-only spacecraft with an elevated degree of autonomy. Enabling a camera-based autonomy requires building appropriate computer vision pipelines. All computer vision pipelines start with the detection of features - salient patterns within the scene. This thesis presents multiple methods and tools enabling the appropriate selection and management of different features for autonomous navigation in proximity to asteroids. To that end, relevant contributions developed during this work consist of:  The development of a software toolbox for prototyping and testing optical navigation technologies through a parametrisable synthetic 3D visual environment;  An analysis of the response of feature detectors to internal factors (e.g., feature model) and external factors (e.g., illumination). This response, once known, can be used for designing the system or to obtain situational awareness  An assessment of the response of template matching methods when the template (model) does not perfectly match the observed target (asteroid, with illumination). Through the above contributions, it was shown that considering environmental cues and the perception model helps in achieving robust camera-only navigation processes. This capability could lead to small satellites autonomously exploring hundreds or thousands of small celestial objects or be employed on more powerful spacecraft for redundancy. PHD

NASA’s TESS mission yields light curves for tens of millions of stars spread across the entire sky, a data set that will be a challenge to fully exploit without help from citizen scientists. To address this, we launched a new citizen science project, called “Planet Patrol”, designed to analyze TESS data on exoplanet and eclipsing binary candidates. The project will also serve to benchmark different data reduction pipelines and help analyze unusual light curves that might defeat automated algorithms. The first stage of the project ran on the Zooniverse platform between 2020 September and November and involved more than 5500 registered volunteers. The Planet Patrol citizen scientists produced nearly 400,000 classifications of difference images used for photocenter analysis of about 1000 planet candidates from TESS. The results were incorporated into the photocenter module of the Discovery And Vetting of Exoplanets (DAVE) pipeline to improve its reliability. Specifically, the classifications indicated that all per-transit difference images are appropriate for photocenter analysis for about 40% of the planet candidates, and the corresponding measurements are sound. In contrast, the volunteers found that all per-transit difference images are dominated by astrophysical contamination and/or systematic effects for about 10% of the planet candidates. This indicated that the corresponding photocenter measurements are unreliable. Finally, the fraction of images appropriate for photocenter analysis varies between 0 and 1 for half the candidates. Removing the images classified as poor from DAVE’s analysis of most of these candidates helped reduce the corresponding photocenter uncertainty by up to ∼30%. We plan to implement the output from another module of DAVE, designed for lightcurve vetting, into a second stage of the Planet Patrol project.

Importance Diabetes mellitus is known to be associated with dry eye syndrome (DES), but the effects of long-term glycaemic control on tear film metrics and dry eye symptoms are not known in the Chinese population. Background To evaluate tear film stability and dry eye symptoms and their associations with systemic risk factors in Chinese patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Design Cross-sectional study set at the Lo Fong Siu Po Eye Centre (Grantham Hospital), Hong Kong. Participants A total of 80 Chinese participants, aged 18 or above, with T2DM recruited from the specialist outpatient setting were included. Methods The Oculus Keratograph 5M (Oculus Inc., Wetzlar, Germany) was used to measure the non-invasive tear break-up time (NITBUT). Ocular symptoms were evaluated using the Ocular Surface Disease Index (OSDI). The association between OSDI, NITBUT and metabolic parameters relating to diabetes were evaluated using multiple linear regression. Main outcome measures The associations between long-term glycaemic control and NITBUT and OSDI scores. Results Stepwise multiple linear regression analysis revealed glycated haemoglobin to be the only significant independent variable for NITBUT (R2 = 0.099, P = 0.014) and OSDI (R2 = 0.062, P = 0.044) after controlling for potential confounders. The age-adjusted prevalence of DES was 20% (95% confidence interval: 11-30%) in the Chinese T2DM population. The odds of DES for increasing percentage of glycated haemoglobin was 1.49 (95% confidence interval: 1.03-2.17, P = 0.04). Conclusions and relevance Our findings highlight the importance of good glycaemic control as a modifiable risk factor for both dry eye symptoms and tear film instability in patients with T2DM.

The ocelot is one of the most studied felid species in the neotropics yet most of our current knowledge comes from tropical rain forests and protected areas. Therefore, we lack a comprehensive understanding on how the species abundance varies in terms of ecological parameters across its full distribution range. This is particularly true for the species population in the Northern Hemisphere, as data of ocelot populations occurring in tropical dry forests are scarce. In this study, we focused on: a) generating population data (density and sex ratios), based on camera-trapping, for ocelot occurring in the vast and understudied tropical dry forest of the western Pacific of Mexico. b) Comparing the variation in species abundance and density across its distribution range, including a larger set of studies from the Northern Hemisphere, contrasting parameters between rain forests and tropical seasonal ecosystems and re-examining the assumed relationship between precipitation and ocelot abundance. Overall, we identified 17 ocelots in our study sites and estimated an average density of 23.7 individuals (ind) per 100 km2 with a female to male ratio >1. No significant differences in ocelot density was found between seasonal tropical forests and rain forests studies (Wilcoxon test, W=71, p=0.7675). Moreover, we found no support for the relation between ocelot density and precipitation (only when restricting our analysis to rain forest data the fit of the regression model was close to be significant, R2=0.2463, p=0.07107). Our results indicate that tropical seasonal ecosystems and dry forest in particular, may present ocelot population with similar levels of abundance than tropical rain forests. We observed that precipitation is a poor predictor of ocelot abundance. In our study, we observed that overall local ecological factors (e.g. prey abundance and interspecific interactions) influenced the spatial and temporal abundance of ocelots.

Diabetes mellitus is known to be associated with dry eye syndrome (DES), but the effects of long-term glycaemic control on tear film metrics and dry eye symptoms are not known in the Chinese population.To evaluate tear film stability and dry eye symptoms and their associations with systemic risk factors in Chinese patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM).Cross-sectional study set at the Lo Fong Siu Po Eye Centre (Grantham Hospital), Hong Kong.A total of 80 Chinese participants, aged 18 or above, with T2DM recruited from the specialist outpatient setting were included.The Oculus Keratograph 5M (Oculus Inc., Wetzlar, Germany) was used to measure the non-invasive tear break-up time (NITBUT). Ocular symptoms were evaluated using the Ocular Surface Disease Index (OSDI). The association between OSDI, NITBUT and metabolic parameters relating to diabetes were evaluated using multiple linear regression.The associations between long-term glycaemic control and NITBUT and OSDI scores.Stepwise multiple linear regression analysis revealed glycated haemoglobin to be the only significant independent variable for NITBUT (ROur findings highlight the importance of good glycaemic control as a modifiable risk factor for both dry eye symptoms and tear film instability in patients with T2DM.

The US-led war on terror has made global security the foremost international priority. The true measure of international commitment to this goal will be whether and how it extends to areas of national interest, particularly in the economic domain. The campaigns for and against the Andean Trade Preference Expansion Act both invoke commitments to security which, upon scrutiny, prove to be specious. Both the US and the Philippines argue variations of the popular contention that greater trade will lead to greater security. In reality, greater trade in the Philippine fisheries sector has contributed to both the food and livelihood insecurity of low-income Filipinos and small-scale fisherfolk. It would seem that policies justified in the name of security more truly serve elite national economic interests. Where elite national interest trumps international commitments, contradictions become apparent and undermine the moral claims of the war effort.